Yahoo is offering to purchase social email startup Xobni for $30 million to $40 million, according to AllThingsD’s sources. If the deal goes through, Xobni would be the latest acquisition by Yahoo as CEO Marissa Meyer seeks to boost the company’s talent roster and product offerings. → Read More
Social email startup Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, has raised $10 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. We confirmed the new round with the company. This brings the startup’s total funding to $42 million.
Xobni says that it signed a commercial agreement, and as part of that agreement, the partnering company invested money in Xobni. We’ve been told… → Read More
As we reported last September, Xobni rebranded its email contact manager Smartr and launched Android and Gmail apps out of private beta. Today, Xobni is debuting the iPhone version of Smartr.
The Smartr Cloud automatically extracts all contacts from your iPhone’s email data (currently integrated with Outlook or Gmail), as well as data from social networks, and makes them easily searchable. A… → Read More
Last year, we wrote about email software company Xobni’s survey that showed that going completely offline from email over the holidays is a thing of the past. And this year’s survey from Xobni reports that even more adults will be checking email over the holidays.
According to the survey 79 percent of U.S. working adults have received work-related emails on the holidays; and 68 percent plan to… → Read More
Xobni, the social email plugin that makes your inbox smarter, is going to make your Outlook email more productive today with the launch of a Gadget Store with apps from collaboration and productivity services such as Dropbox, Evernote, JIRA, Klout, Salesforce, WebEx, and Yammer.
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin… → Read More
Ever since Xobni launched at the first TechCrunch 40, it’s been about Outlook and then Blackberry. But those of us who use Gmail also want to make our inboxes smarter. Today, Xobni is launching aprivate beta for Gmail, and will soon also launch iPhone and Android apps. The first 100 readers to sign up for the Gmail beta will get in (use the code XOBNI-TC100).
The Gmail app comes in the form of… → Read More
Right now I’m neck deep in product launch mode, putting the finishing touches on our new mobile video application—Socialcam. Of course, I’ve been here before . . .
Years ago when we launched the Justin.tv show we had no idea what we were doing. This much was obvious to anyone who watched. Outsiders attribute far more strategic thought to the venture than we gave it. Some think that we… → Read More
We know that email has done away with the nine to five job but does anyone ignore emails over holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving anymore? A new study by email software company Xobni suggests that going completely offline from email over the holidays may also be a thing of the past. According to the survey, 59 percent of U.S. working adults will check work email over holidays.
Of the survey… → Read More
Part of the YCombinator class of 2006, Xobni only recently launched its first non-English language version in German after partnering with the German Linkedin, Xing. Yet, given the high number of French users, the company has decided to make France it’s 2nd international market and is rolling-out the French version of its product today. But still, don’t try spelling the French word for email inbox… → Read More
A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post).
Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha)… → Read More
Back in June, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith wrote a blog post announcing he was moving on from the company, and handing over the CTO reins. We’ve just confirmed that fellow co-founder Matt Brezina has also left the company.
The timing of Brezina’s departure isn’t fully clear, but we hear it was also a few weeks ago — he just didn’t have the big blog post about it. Obviously, having both… → Read More
On the heels of the as of yet unprofitable Demand Media IPO filing, it looks like email software purveyor Xobni (Inbox spelled backwards) has decided to spend money on a mural. And an elaborate one at that. While the rest of the country is gearing up for a second recession, the tech sector seems blissfully exempt with inflated billion dollar valuations being flung left and right. Will startup burn… → Read More
Social email startup Xobni is channeling Microsoft today. The company is now selling the premium version of its product, called Xobni Plus, which the company rolled out last year, in a number of stores. The boxed software, which will be featured in stores right next to the newly released Microsoft Office 2010 software, will be sold at Office Max, Fry’s and a few other brick and mortar… → Read More
Xobni, the popular Outlook plug-in for searching and managing contacts in Microsoft Outlook, is launching a German verion. It makes sense. German speakers are their second biggest set of users according to the company.
The move is the first in a wave of internationalization the startu is planning in the near future. → Read More
One of the startups that pitched the crowd last week at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam, and whose co-founder Rahul Vohra myself and the other jury members crowned the best presenter of the bunch, was Rapportive, which loftily promises to “make email a better place”.
I promised myself to check out their product extensively over the weekend, and now that I did I’m seriously glad to have… → Read More
Xobni, a social Microsoft Outlook plugin, has just raised $16.2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures, with Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, First Round Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco participating in the round. We confirmed this with the company. This brings Xobni’s total funding to over $30 million.
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail… → Read More
It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.
Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be… → Read More
As we first reported on Friday, Microsoft is adding some social hooks into Outlook 2010. Outlook will gain the ability to pull in profile information, photos, and update streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. You can try the LinkedIn plugin now in beta. The other social networks will be added later when Outlook 2010 goes on sale, probably in July.
The new social features make it look a… → Read More
Tonight, Xobni is selectively allowing users to download a new version of its client with a number of UI enhancements. This launch coincides with Xobni’s new Salesforce extension. This is notable because it marks the launch of premium extensions for the first time, that give the company a new potential revenue stream.
Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot… → Read More
Earlier tonight, Xobni quietly released, at least to some users, a new version of its Outlook plug-in that brings Twitter streams into your email in an intelligent way. Instead of acting like any other Twitter client and showing you the full stream of everyone you follow, it shows you only the recent Tweets of the person whose email you are reading, whether or not you follow them on Twitter. (A… → Read More
In venture capital, Vinod Khosla likes to go his own way, which is why he’s been so successful. He was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and then moved to venture capital and became a star partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he backed Juniper Networks, Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7 billion) and NexGen (sold to AMD and formed the basis for its challenge to Intel). About five years ago, after… → Read More
Xobni, a startup that looks to make your inbox a little less chaotic, is well known for walking away from an acquisition offer from Microsoft last year, not long after being publically complimented by Bill Gates. Since then the service has continued to grow, with over 2 million downloads in the last year and an avid user base. But until now, there’s been one big piece of the puzzle missing: a… → Read More
It’s been just one month since email startup Xobni got an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund, which brought its total B round up to $10 million, and already it has a working prototype for an upcoming Blackberry app. Xobni executives were showing off the app at a Mobile Meetup in San Francisco last night, and the screenshot above found its way into my inbox (which is “xobni” spelled… → Read More
With the news that Facebook is going to begin allowing developers to incorporate full streams into their applications, developers are scrambling to get their apps up to speed. This morning we got our first look at the upcoming new version of Seesmic Desktop, and now we’ve learned that Xobni, the popular Outlook plugin that helps make Email easier to manage, will be going live with a new upgrade… → Read More
Smarter-email startup Xobni has raised $7 million in a B round of financing from Cisco Systems and existing investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Atomico. Three of the four existing investors increased their ownership stakes in the company. But Cisco led the round, highlighting the importance of enterprise e-mail for Xobni (that’s where the money is). CEO Jeff… → Read More
Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June.
Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these… → Read More
Xobni, the Y Combinator email startup that turned down an acquisition offer from Microsoft earlier this year, has just lost its VP Engineering and first employee, Gabor Cselle. Cselle joined the company in March 2007, sporting a seemingly perfect resume that included work on the Gmail team and a Master’s thesis on “Organizing Email”. The departure may not be abrupt (Cselle… → Read More
Xobni, the email startup that we’ve described as “The Superplugin for Outlook”, has partnered with LinkedIn to automatically pull contact information from the popular professional network. Xobni will now draw from public profiles on the LinkedIn network, displaying information about contacts’ employers, job titles, and pictures as part of the plugin’s sidebar. → Read More
It might not be as sexy as Xobni, but Outlook users who find that plugin useful should check out ClearContext Personal. It too intends to make email more manageable, albeit with a greater focus on projects than people (you won’t find any attempt to turn email contacts into a social network here). ClearContext Personal has a number of tricks up its sleeve. First, it analyzes 30-40… → Read More
This is an interesting story in light of the discussion yesterday about the fate of the intellectual property of failed startups. Email startup Xobni, which recently turned down a $20 million acquisition offer from Microsoft, says they have acquired the key patents around a product called Zaplets which originally launched in 2000. Zaplets was an email product that put synchronized applications… → Read More
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